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AKA – How I Use The FIVERR Gauntlet To C h e a p l y M a k e M y B o o k s S t a n d O u t In A World Drowning In Self-Published Content
Hearken unto me, for this is one of the coolest shortcuts I’ve ever discovered. While I was writing 80/20 Sales & Marketing, I gave the manuscript to a number of friends and asked them “Hey, would you review this?” I fast realized I have a very small number of friends who will plow through a whole book for me.
Then I got a bright idea: “Why don’t I go to Fiverr.com and pay people to read this?” So I did.
First, I would find people that were offering some kind of marketing related service on Fiverr, so I knew they were, to some degree at least, the target audience for the book. Then, I would message them and say, “Hey, I wrote a book. Will you read it for five gigs = $25?”
I got about 30 people to say yes.
I asked them just a few questions:
- What were your two favorite chapters?
- What were your two least favorite chapters?
- Was there any place where you got lost or confused?
- Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not?
- Would you buy it in the bookstore for X dollars when it comes out?
- Why or why not?
Every single reviewer pointed out a couple of places in the book where they got bogged down.
I was amazed.
Just about every single piece of feedback I got resulted in changes to the book. Thirty reviewers resulted in thirty or so changes. Some chapters got completely trashed. Minor passages expanded and got pulled up to front-and-center prominence.
Suddenly, I truly understood what people liked about the book. And more importantly, it forced me to untangle a lot of stuff that I thought had been clear but was not.
You might say, “Isn’t this what an editor is for?”
Well, Fiverr readers do not tell you the same kinds of things that professional editors tell you. Professional editors are very useful and every professional writer should use one, but an extensive commentary from one “expert” is not the same as a shotgun blast from 30 “average” folks.
You get a true sense of what your average reader thinks.
You also might be thinking, “Well, yeah, but what kind of quality are you’re going to get from people that are working for five bucks an hour?”
Better than you think.
First of all, even the ones that truly are only worth five dollars an hour are going to give a basic, lizard brain response. And that is extremely valuable, I don’t care what your topic is. Knowing in advance what the Village Idiot is going to say is never a bad thing.
Beyond that, 10 to 20% of them are really sharp. And they’re using Fiverr as a lead generator (if they’re smart), and they are really good at what they do. I found a couple of really good editors and vendors through this very Fiverr experiment that I continue to use now. I just sent one $800 last week.
I have now used this method multiple times with multiple projects.
I consider the Fiverr Gauntlet to be a mandatory step for any book. Ignore it at your peril.
Photo by Emilian Robert Vicol cc by-sa
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world’s best selling book on Google advertising. And he’s driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by The New York Times, The Washington Post, INC and Forbes Magazine.
